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Obituaries

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It is obvious in retrospect that someone should have reported to police in 2002 the charges of child sexual abuse against Jerry Sandusky that now are the center of the furor surrounding Penn State University.

That's obvious as a moral and ethical matter but it is not necessarily obvious as a matter of law, which should change.

Mike McQueary, an assistant football coach who is now on administrative leave, told a grand jury that in 2002 he observed former football coach Jerry Sandusky sexually assaulting a boy of about 10 in a football facility shower. McQueary did not intervene, but reported what he had seen to his boss, Joe Paterno.

When he testified, Paterno didn't recall McQueary's details quite as vividly, but said he reported up the chain of command at the university to Tim Curley, the athletic director.

Much of the debate around the debacle is about whether McQueary and Paterno should have done more. As a legal matter, however, they appear to have done pretty much what the law requires by reporting up the ladder. State law assigns to the head of the organization the responsibility for reporting to police or a child welfare agency.

Curley and a university vice president, Gary Schultz, have been charged with failing to report the alleged crime and with perjury relative to their grand jury testimony.

Several legal experts have said that the reporting requirement is further deficient in that it specifies certain people within certain institutions who must report child abuse, but does so in terms of coming into contact with such children in the course of their employment. That might not apply to Curley or Schultz.

The law should mandate that anyone who learns of child sexual abuse must report it.

That alone won't eliminate abuse, but it will eliminate legal gray areas for failing to report and diminish the temptation to look the other way.

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